Posts tagged “School”

[Because my mind hasn’t yet adjusted to normal post-writing processes, here’s another school essay in lieu of contemplative anime analysis. It’s a comparison of James Joyce’s Ulysses (of which I’ve only read the first three chapters!) and Homer’s Odyssey, which our entire class read previously. After getting some flak for dissing Dr. Campbell last time, I wax lyrical over his ‘accomplishments’ now. This time, the word limit really is 1000 words, which I’ve once again filled completely…]

The Odyssey starts with Telemachus seeking information of his father. His house is overrun with rowdy suitors, and he feels powerless against them. He commences his own Hero’s Journey to find Odysseus. The main themes in the Telemachia are the suitors’ unwanted domestic occupation and Telemachus’s spiritual growth as he meets Nestor and Menelaus. When he returns, he has become a man.

Ulysses’s first part, also called the Telemachia, chronicles three hours of an ordinary, insignificant Dublin morning in 1904, as Dedalus contemplates life. Dedalus is an ordinary young man living with a ‘friend’ who insults his dead mother and snatches away the house key. The first chapter’s last line is “Usurper”; thus, Dedalus believes his ‘friend’ usurped his home (Joyce 35), like the suitors usurped Telemachus’s. He too embarks on a subdued ‘adventure’, meeting with his anti-Semitic employer, Deasy, and ruminating life along the beach. This parallels Telemachus’s fruitless meeting with Nestor and Proteus’s information about Odysseus. Deasy lectures that “a faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman O’Rourke” (Joyce 53). Actually, MacMurrough abducted O’Rourke’s wife, preceding the Norman Invasion of Ireland (Braín 1152.6). Nestor’s reputation for wisdom, yet lack of useful information, corresponds to Deasy’s historical ignorance. Proteus’s shape-shifting represents change, so Joyce’s interior monologue narrative style constantly changes direction, yet illuminates Dedalus’s perspectives on life and regret over not accomplishing childhood dreams.

The Telemachia displays many early monomythic plot points. Telemachus’s Call to Adventure is Odysseus’s disappearance. Athena aids Telemachus by spurring him on; after reaching Pylos, he has Crossed the First Threshold into the unknown, away from the his home’s safety. The Telemachia ends here; later, Telemachus’s Belly of the Whale is the suitors’ ambush, and he Atones with his Father in Eumaeus’s hut. Odysseus’s adventure is more overtly monomythic, but Dedalus corresponds only to Telemachus.

Dedalus’s Call to Adventure is his ‘friend’ demanding drinking money and the house key, paralleling the suitors’ thankless cadgering. A milk woman indirectly spurs his journey by exacerbating Dedalus’s scorn of his ‘friend’; Campbell observes that “the milk woman is the role of Athena, who comes to Telemachus when he is 22 and tells him to go forth, find his father” (Campbell Disc 3). He Crosses the First Threshold after his meeting with the obtuse sexist Deasy, who gives Dedalus thick racist remarks and his salary. Finally, he enters the ‘unknown’: his own mind. To readers, this is shocking: few writers would illustrate natural human thought with natural—illogical—first-person topic transitions. Readers are truly venturing where no man has gone before.

The Odyssey’s monomythic scope is more obvious than Ulysses’s. Telemachus sets out on a voyage, and Odysseus wanders the wine-dark sea for a decade, encountering fantastic creatures. Telemachus is not a hero. He starts weak, irresolute, and naïve, but grows through his journey. However, the monomyth is about the story, not the character: protagonists can even be morally repugnant ‘villains’, their Ultimate Boon perhaps being world destruction, as long as they venture into the unknown and return with an Ultimate Boon. Thus, the Odyssey, as a monomyth, transcends the Hero’s Journey—it is a journey without a hero.

Ulysses lacks the Odyssey’s scope, merely detailing an ordinary Dublin day. However, as the Odyssey transcends the Hero’s Journey, so does Ulysses. Joyce’s writing elevates Dedalus’s thoughts to a godlike level; the sheer breadth and range of his interior monologue’s allusions equate his commonplace musings to an epic. He sees midwives carrying a misbirth, and ponders about an unending chain of navel cords, linking all humanity back to Adam and Eve: “Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (Joyce 57). This connection to the Genesis broadens his monologue’s temporal scope; a typical day on the beach and Dedalus has already alluded to all human history.

The grandiosity gradually decreases over the chapter. He broods on what could have been in his own past: “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves […]? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara […] You were going to do wonders, what?” (Joyce 61, 63). This shows his disgust with his past’s naïve optimism. Like all epics, the scope is first historical, and now personal. Eventually, reality overtakes his philosophical reverie, and his thoughts deal with the immediate: “My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up? […] He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock” (Joyce 76). This concludes the chapter, a tour de force from Eden to snot. Although the setting is a walk on the beach, Joyce’s purview transcends its humdrum nature: from molehill to mountain, from the mundane to the sublime.

Both Ulysses and its hypotext, the Odyssey, contain early monomythic plot points. The Odyssey transcends a Hero’s Journey because Telemachus is not heroic, yet his tale is still a monomyth. Ulysses transcends the monomyth because, although Dedalus’s ‘journey into the unknown’ is ordinary, Joyce’s interior monologue transforms his thoughts into a genuine adventure. Thus, both Ulysses and the Odyssey represent the monomyth.

It is only appropriate: Campbell, a Joyce scholar, borrowed the term ‘monomyth’ from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. These two works, Ulysses and the Odyssey, stand as a testament to the monomyth’s ubiquity—so many works embody the monomyth that we learn nothing from cross-comparison! Joyce creates an oxymoron—a common hero, shaping the power of literary form into a medium of literary expression. Stephen Dedalus’s Hero’s Journey has no hero, has no journey; Joyce elevates the everyman to create a hero, his words transcendent.

[We read the Odyssey in English class, and had to write a variety of assignments (ok, fine, just two) on it. One of these assignments was a comparative essay, in which students could choose their thesis, yet on the criteria sheet, ‘all students must use the same thesis’. The thesis in question was that an old Coen Brothers’ comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), loosely based on the Odyssey, represents Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

I thought the Hero’s Journey was just some old man saying that all cultures’ hero stories had a beginning, a middle, and an end. He also claimed that these stories reflected humanity’s ‘collective unconscious’, and that people like to hear stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Although it seems obvious to us, it is pretty coincidental and influential in studying comparative mythology and evolutionary psychology. Yet, I thought that the Hero’s Journey structure offered no insights into modern ‘heroes’ journeys’.

This jaded me immensely, and like the contrarian hipster I am, I decided to advocate for the Devil. The result is below; formatted, but unedited. If it seems to jump around in places, it’s because I condensed it to one page of 1000 words, ‘for the lulz’. I like it, but I still haven’t gotten my grade back, and I have the feeling that my English teacher won’t like people casting the Hero’s Journey aside…]

In the 1988 PBS documentary The Power of Myth, mythologist Joseph Campbell talks of his theory: a universally archetypal Hero’s Journey originating from the fundamental human psyche. The Hero’s Journey’s plot points, although useful for comparative mythology, are too generic. To differentiate Heroes’ Journeys from regular Journeys, Heroes’ Journeys must star a hero with heroic traits, deeds, and growth.

Ancient poet Homer’s Odyssey is about protagonist Odysseus’s voyage home from the Trojan War. Although contemporary Greeks heroized Odysseus, in a modern/Roman context, he possesses few heroic requirements. The Coen Brothers’ modern film O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s protagonist Ulysses represents Odysseus, and also lacks these requirements.

Remember when Whiners.pro commented on my horrible poetry? Don’t worry, I’m not going to torture you guys with any more of that. Instead, have something worse: pretentious poetic ‘analysis’. It’s analysis in the loosest sense since it’s more an exercise of elongation (an exercise beneficial to many organs, specifically that of the e-peen). Here, I’ll spoil you in advance: all I talk about in this essay is that people feel differently about poetry when they’re angry or sad. Or happy. Or dead. Or mushyrulez. Or mushysuckz. Hey, it’s I Say (read: essay) Wednesday, if az can post a bad school essay I’m entitled to post a bad school essay too

In a pitiful attempt to introduce new scheduled posts à la Musical Mondays, it’s time to pitifully attempt to schedule new introduction posts with a new tag: Vendredis de Vacances! Which means ‘Fridays of Vacation’ in French, which I had to make in french to keep its alliterative qualities, for no weekday begins with a ‘V’. Anyhow, these posts will have me talk about my ~marvelous adventures~ in being an overbearing first-world snob and wasting money on frivolous tours.

It’s a vacation post. Expect pretty pictures. Prepare for letdown. (HINT: The link in the above paragraph actually contains PRETTY PICTURES!!) Death of my life, it’s my character to only take ugly pictures

Yes, I know. The pun doesn’t even make sense, because y’know, it’s actually May 6th right now and I’m lying to you guys about this post date. But guess what, O-New TRANSCENDS time and space, and I can post bad puns ANYWHERE, ANYTIME I want to. DEAL WITH IT

In this post which is not about anime nor manga and is instead about the life of the most boring person to ever walk the earth, I will talk about:

May the Fourth

How I’ve Only Watched the First Episode of Star Wars

Dropbox Contests

Cinco de Mayo

Birthday Presents

How I’m Not a Nerd Because I Don’t Play Video Games

How I Learned to Love the Aniblog Tourney

Flower Pictures

Your Face

Outdoor Track Meets

Your Mother’s Face

Rest assured, I will touch upon every single one of those topics, and in that order!!

Before you accuse me of depraved intentions, no, this is not a post dissecting the many features of the female form. Instead, it is a post about Hourou Musuko, femininity, masculinity, and gender roles in a society where a boy is not a boy and a girl is not a girl. Except when they are, of course. Now, you know that I can’t tackle serious issues like this, so I hope you guys will comment and actually discuss, y’know, real stuff, and not the shit I put into my posts. My newfound popularity (?) after a spectacular loss to Shameful Otaku Secret ought to promote this discussion. OUGHT TO.

You know how our season previews go. There’s a basic formula to all of them. First, a summary, then a picture, then a disclaimer talking about how I stole all this information from other blogs, and then the actual post, written by me, Mushyrulez, all by myself.

WELL GUESS WHAT?! WE’RE SWITCHING THINGS UP A BIT THIS YEAR. How?

Firstly, there WON’T BE A PICTURE after a summary which is this summary which is this sentence and the sentences immediately before and after this.

Secondly, there WON’T BE A DISCLAIMER after a picture because, wow, we’ve actually done our own research (read: searching for trailers on YouTube) this time!! This also means no handy embedded chart here; just search for it yourself. And seriously, if you’re going to read the chart anyways, there’s hardly any point reading this post. At least after you read this post, you’ll still have an excuse to read the chart. This paragraph is not a disclaimer telling you that this post actually doesn’t talk about anime at all.

Thirdly, there WON’T BE BLUE TRAILER LINKS because I can’t modify the link style on this new theme I’m using!! I know, simply horrible, right? The Carnelian (dark-reddish-brown, for those less artistically inclined) texts are links. It gets pretty confusing when I put it after orange text, which is written by me.

Finally, there WON’T JUST BE ME writing this post (otherwise, why would I colour my text?), because it’s time for O-New to DIVERSIFY like Random Curiosity and METANORN have done, although of course, we’re much more HIGH TENSION SYNDROME. AbsoluteZero255 has so kindly accepted my offer to let him write 99% of this post (using this colour of blue text), unlike that other guy flare who is being such a flare not writing posts and flaring his flare and OK, LET US MOVE ON TO THE PREVIEW. Ready? GO!